5) Poverty and disadvantage

A quartet of reports analysing disadvantage and poverty in the UK have recently become available. While not happy reading, these do map out the terrain we face.

Barnardos produced a vivid report into the experience of poverty in the UK http://www.barnardos.org.uk/poverty/poverty-findout.htm

HEFCE have released a study into the dynamics of disadvantage in a single geographical area with multiple social difficulties. The Guardian summary can be found at http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,2196860,00.html This report reviews the ways in which different forms of disadvantage can be compounded and then become very difficult to address http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2007/rd16_07

The latest Joseph Rowntree Foundation poverty study as summarised in a BBC report http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7121667.stm and the full report http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/2152-poverty-social-exclusion.pdf
Finally, a report from the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) Working out of Poverty: A study of the low paid and the working poor by Graeme Cooke and Kayte Lawton. The authors find that there are now 1.4 million poor children living in working households, the same number as in 1997. Since that year the number of poor children in workless households has fallen from two million to 1.4 million. This finding of families remaining in poverty, even when an adult moves into work, is a very difficult one for the government, as the anti-poverty program is premised on the idea that the main way out of poverty is employment.
Key points
· More than a million children in Britain are living in poverty despite the fact that at least one of their parents is in work
· Overall poverty levels in 2006 were the same as in 2002.
· Child poverty in 2006 was still 500,000 higher than the target set for 2005.
· Overall earnings inequalities are widening.
. Disability rather than lone parenthood is the factor most likely to lead to worklessness.